(National Book Award nominee) The story of two glamorous people—Countess Atalanta Mercati, a beautiful aristocrat, and Michael Arlen, an Armenian immigrant and one of the most popular authors of the 1920s—this impressionistic memoir by Arlen's son evokes his parents' seemingly charmed life in Hollywood and New York. Michael J. Arlen chronicles a childhood spent between homes and boarding schools, and the decline of a famous man and a family once full of love, joy, and pride in one another.

"One would be forgiven for wanting to read Exiles on the merit of its name-dropping glamour alone, even if glamour is only the tenth best thing about the book.... It reveals the lives of three extraordinary people and it carries the author toward his soul's interior, there to come to terms, both in his mind and in the reader's, with the essential condition of being an exile."—NYTimes